In higher education in the US today, particular practices of global engagement are positioned as essential to student learning. Institutional stakeholders foreground the potential of outward‐facing orientation to the globe while sidestepping local connections to racial inequality and injustice foregrounded by student and waged‐worker activism. Faculty and student composition, course content and hierarchies of waged work have been targeted by activists from within and without. In this example, relations between labour, students and administrators at a large southern research university in the USA reveal the mechanisms by which especially neoliberal cosmopolitanisms require an intentional and narrow rendering of what and who counts in the production of campus life. A discussion of student activism and changes to housekeeping work practices reveal how power is produced and divided by controlling and corralling particular kinds of social reproductive labour. In light of the redistribution and erasure of this labour, we argue that US universities are geopolitical in nature, shaping young people's orientations to an imagined global citizenship to create a specific form of cosmopolitanism that centres whiteness and makes claim to a globally oriented generosity rather than a justice‐oriented framework with explicit connections to the breadth of waged work undergirding university life and practice. To create this possibility, the university frequently side‐steps complex interconnections between student life and systems of racialised, ethnicised and gendered exploitation in local spaces in favour of a focus of similar inequalities in the world “out there.”

The Skaneateles Lake Watershed Composting Toilet Project highlights the material and sociocultural challenges of developing new kinds of embodied practices that effectively utilize alternatives to traditional water-dependent plumbing. Practical, small-scale innovation is important to addressing the human dimensions of these changes, particularly given the widely held taboos informing discussion of what happens behind closed bathroom doors. In this example an innovative watershed policy placed composting toilets in seventy-five lakeside homes to prevent household blackwater from polluting an unfiltered drinking water source utilized by 250 000 people. Interviews with key informants and participating households illustrate the ways in which expectations of toileting practice sit in tension with the need to preserve the health of the local watershed, particularly over the long term. Understanding shifts in toileting practice must move past functional assessments of new or untested technology, taking into account sociocultural understandings of private, deeply embodied, yet resolutely pragmatic daily habits. As individuals seek to normalize new toilet technology as a part of daily routines, they encounter the body's materiality in ways that conflict with expectations of what belongs inside the home. In this case, the traditionally excluded effluence of the human body remains too close for comfort, forcing a renegotiation of the common boundary-making habits defining domestic space. The result is a shift in expectations about what of the body can or should belong in the home.

At a major research institution in the American South, cleanliness norms are intensifying for students, housekeepers, and institutional administrators. Whether individual practice, waged labor, or institutional policy concern, daily hygiene routines often refer to invisible or otherwise absent threats to health. Broadly construed as ‘germs’, these include flu, norovirus, and Escherichia coli, as well as dirt, dust mites, allergens, and mold. Their mobilization influences students’ and housekeepers’ interpersonal relations in a range of common university spaces, revealing connections among disease, embodiment, risk, and care. At the same time, concern with germs aligns with institutional efforts to control a historically powerful cadre of workers. Connections between students’ experiences of health and disease risk and housekeeper and institutional orientation to those risks are obscure, although fundamentally constitutive of each other. Analysis of their different, but intersecting ideas about microbial hygienic risk draws together critical geographies of social reproductive labor, cultural geographies of more-than-human agency, and a recent call to elaborate a political ecology of health. Ethnographic and archival data reveal how germs retrench institutional disparities, placing the (re)production of student cleanliness practices and the working lives of housekeepers in tension. For students, germs help shore up valorized subject positions, informing regimes of self-care. For department administrators, a new employee management regime made the potential of microbial threats to student health a scientific instrument of labor control. For housekeepers, germs are particularly evocative of the demand to care for student health by managing exposure to microbial disease risk. Exploring different mobilizations of germs reveals the importance of more-than-human life to systems of and divisions between social reproductive labor regimes on campus.

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